Or maybe you can, as I note for The Source today…

Scottish journalists Shaun Milne and Iain Pope aren’t so shy. Their new site, Two Fat Laddies (you can follow them on Twitter too) went live on Hogmanay to track their shared vow to shed five stones (32 kilos) each. You’ll quickly become intimately introduced to the pair. They’re the ones in the revealing poses in the site’s masthead, and there are plenty more frankly astonishing images elsewhere. Their mission is succinctly summed up in the strapline: “Two fat Scottish lads, 10 stone to lose…..and one year to do it”.

It’s a lovely idea – blog about your mammoth diet challenge, supported by all manner of incriminating photographs, audio and video. And as if their example wasn’t inspirational enough (I mean, would anyone who’s not Jeff Jarvis go this public?) they’re raising money for charity as they shed the pounds. Shaun’s supporting Mountain Rescue Scotland, while Iain backs Macmillan in Scotland.

Good luck to them both. With this pair’s reporting ability I’m sure this blog should be a good read. Iain’s already blogged movingly about the foods he’ll miss while on his diet; pies, sausages and full English breakfasts stand out for me as the big sacrifices. And I’ll be backing them all the way, even if (and you’ll be relieved to here this) I don’t follow their example and strip down to my boxers for the world to see.

Childhood ends here: AJ prepares for life in the Premiership with his fancy boots (Baby Bentley just out of shot)

It turns out I’m stealing the childhood of my two-year-old, desperately hoping he’ll hand me a pension by signing a contract with a top Premiership club 16 years from now. Today, I’m forcing him to train “professionally” and shutting him away from children not blessed with his talent and – God help him – rich genetic inheritance.

That, at least, is the message from Viv Groskop in the Observer, writing about The End of Jumpers for Goalposts. While my two-year old heads off to Socatots, a football-themed playgroup, Viv’s seven year-old can’t get a game because it appears all his friends are off playing organised games.

He can’t get a game, but his mum managed to get 2,000 words on why not – and it’s all to do with the “over professionalisation of childhood football”, probably by over-ambitious dads like me. She writes:

“Many of the other boys he wants to play with have been in coaching since they were three or four. They’re not keen to play with amateurs. There are plenty of soccer fanatics around, but if you’re remotely serious you train several times a week. You want to play seriously and be refereed properly. There’s no more jumpers for goal posts. It’s enough of a rarity to see boys playing football in jeans. Playground football for boys like my son – who love football but have no ambitions to be the next Rooney – has virtually disappeared.

This situation upsets me. I’m not a football person and neither is Will’s father. But we want to encourage him. Football is a common language for boys of any age. And surely it’s especially important to know your way around the game if you’re not naturally sporty? Will is not keen to go into training. He just wants a kickabout now and again. In the playground he cunningly cast himself as the goalie for a while, until he got bored of that. Now it sounds like he just doesn’t really bother. It’s all too intimidating. So what can we do?”

Viv’s right about the importance of football among boys (and, indeed, their dads). Unfortunately, what she describes is only marginally about the sometimes-appalling youth structure of British football (for a more authoritative report on that, the excellent David Conn’s report on youth development from last year remains the best I can think of).

What she’s really writing about is the rite of male passage that is: learning you’re not very good at football. Trust me. I know what I’m talking about here.

The only things I lacked as a player were pace and skill. Even in the 80s, long before Sky and all-seater stadiums and Baby Bentleys, the boys who were any use at the sport quickly weren’t playing with the likes of me. They headed off to organised games and training sessions where, it was said, ghastly parents would shout and swear from the sidelines. Meanwhile, the boys who were a bit rubbish, or whose parents don’t want them involved (or know the ways into that world), were left to scrabble around for a game elsewhere.

In communities without open spaces, it was – and is – doubtless hard to find a game. In others – like where I was brought up – you eventually found a band of equally talentless mates, and a patch of grass. The jumpers went down, and you got a game.

As then, now. The boys who don’t really care for football don’t play very much. Those who are madly, but rubbish, keen find a way to get their fill. It’s a great way to learn social skills and overcome shyness, as you assail any random group and ask (at least in Scotland): “Gizza game? Room for one more?”. Later in life, when you’ve swapped school uniform for office uniform, there’s a code; you ask if the game is “serious”. If not, you’re in. If there’s mention of leagues and strips and a second XI, the hopeless player bewares.

What do I hope for my son? In a world populated by role models such as John Terry, Wayne Rooney and Joey Barton, certainly not a professional contract. I’d much rather he became a banker. But I do hope he picks up enough skill for him to enjoy the sport, and be good enough play in organised games with his banker friends, if he wants. I’ll be delighted he’s not stuck in front of a computer screen, playing games or writing a blog or something else dreadful.

And, for the moment, he appears to love his football.

Take last weekend. I’m reasonably certain that two-year-olds are supposed to like the snow. There’s the opportunity for snowball fights, snowman building and general slippery-slidy fun. Not for ours. On Saturday morning, a fresh inch or two lying on the ground, young Al wanted only one thing. “Ball,” he said. “More ball,” he added by way of confirmation. For further emphasis, he swung his right leg towards my shin a few times.

Football’s tricky in the snow, alas. Worse, the devilish Socatots was off this week. The church wanted its hall back for some kind of seasonal activity. The whole day was somewhat spoiled as Al, denied his run out, bounced around the house like a coiled spring. “Ball!” he cried, frustrated we couldn’t get his message.

That’s m’boy. I suspect that, as he gets older, he’ll always find a way to find a game.

First, woe for those who choose to brave Russia in 2018 – how will they travel that huge nation! Will they build railways and roads as good as England’s by then? (Answer: what do you think?. And rail travel will be free, the Russian bid promises).

Then there’s Quatar and its air-conditioned stadiums and training grounds, 40-degree heat and – most importantly – how will anyone get a drink? (Answer to all the above: stay in a five-star hotel. Don’t bring any tinnies with you.)

The concern for fans is laudable, even if the motivation for it – fury at England’s failure, mainly – is obvious. Britain’s own vested interests aside, the outrage also reflects anger at something so counter to our sentimental, very British way of viewing football.

Subscribe to this view and also subscribe to the belief that a brilliant, emotional last-minute presentation by a prince, Prime Minister and Becks himself might actually have swung it, where England’s history in the game counts for much, where the awarding of a multi-billion dollar sporting franchise isn’t executed with a cold-eyed regard for the bottom line.

On the ground, fans who travel to World Cups quickly get to know their place. Finals – like any major sporting occasion – are made-for-TV events these days. Fans are there to provide some atmosphere for the broadcast, and cutaways after a goal has been scored. To attend a big final – my last was the UEFA Cup final in Manchester back in 2008 – is to understand how much of what goes on, right down to the trophy presentation, is for the benefit of the cameras.

At home on the sofa watching TV is where most of the fans – and money – is. The rise of effective global TV coverage removes the barrier to having the world’s biggest sporting occasion in any corner of the world Sepp Blatter the FIFA executive committee chooses. We’re not blinking at fuzzy images from Mexico, ala 1986, any more (although I maintain that was a high-water mark for World Cup themes. That’s another post).

The pitches will be fine. The facilities, paid for by natural resource riches, will universally be reported as magnificent by national team managers and embedded sports reporters. We will all agree.

FIFA’s motivation can have little to do, directly at least, with sporting matters or sentimentality about the motherland of football. They want to partner with rich nations, strengthen fanbases in underdeveloped (in footballing terms) places, bring in new sponsors, put on a great TV show, and reap the rewards for doing so.

As The Journal delicately put it when discussing the 2022 award: “A desire to make history, and the opportunity to partner with the natural gas fortune of the Qatari royal family, ultimately proved irresistible to FIFA.”

Quite.

But there is far more shocking news emerging from Scotland today, surrounding smooth-voiced Charles “Chick” Young (right), often rightly called the Barry White of Scottish sports reporting for his mellow broadcast reflection on matters both on and off the pitch and who, for a man of such fame, is well-known for the remarkable modesty with which he holds his many views.

Our hero had to be stretchered off the park during a Journalists vs MSPs football match on Sunday, following a red-blooded tackle from Labour’s John Park, which led to the MSP’s sending off before the game was entirely abandoned.

News of this shocking assault has only emerged today.

Red-faced MSP Ken Macintosh, who also played in the game, can be heard in the audio clip accompanying this story on BBC Radio Scotland about the match, expressing his regret and apologising to the Chick.

But it’s a measure of Chick’s legendary perspective that, even though the programme was clearly trying to play the whole episode in an ill-judged attempt at “laughs”, he found the courage to not accept that apology, and also brand the tackle as “evil, in my opinion”.

Talking to the Scottish Daily Record, Chick added: “John Park did me.  I’ve got six stud marks down my leg. I’m still limping.”

Chick told the Glasgow Evening Times: “They played like thugs. The treatment of us and the ref was scandalous.”

Chick added, to the Times: “One guy playing at the back for them was a nutcase of the first order and their language to the ref was scandalous. They totally lost the plot.”

And Chick pointed, in an interview with the Scotsman, to the clear political ramifications of the rammie, reminding his public: “What worries me most of all: these are the people who are in charge of running the country.”

The journalists had been losing 6-2 to the people in charge of running the country before scuffles broke out and the game was abandoned.

Adds that Times report: “One of Mr Park’s team-mates said that the journalists had over-reacted. ‘I don’t think there will be a return match.”

• My regular reader will recall Chick’s last appearance on this blog, when we brought you this classic YouTube footage of an ill-fated interview with Rangers manager Walter Smith. Warning – strong language on the other side of that link.

A couple more links from today’s Times; first, Magnus Linklater asks: “Where would that rescue fund, its value estimated at about £100bn – the equivalent of Scotland’s entire GDP – have come from?”. Unlike Fraser Nelson in the Spectator (quoted yesterday) Linklater sees a “penal” level of taxation in a parallel universe where Scotland is now independent.

Meanwhile, a leader in the same paper reckons “when the Scottish financial sector, the fifth largest in Europe, cannot survive without help from London, the case for the Union is strengthened… The Union that has served [Scotland] for three centuries may be the only asset in Scotland that has not depreciated sharply over the last two weeks.”

Alex Salmond is, of course, playing a long game; future electoral reform that reduced Scotland’s over-representation in Westminster, and/or removed Scottish MP’s votes from English and Welsh matters, would usher in a long era of Conservative government. That would certainly aid Salmond’s cause, and the pain of this crunch might by then be forgotton, as the Guardian’s Severin Carrell pointed out yesterday.

But this is all just politics playing on our short memories; you’d have to worry the fundamentals would not necessarily have changed in Scotland’s favour by then, whether or not we could remember the worrying times we’re living through today.

[Later: Shaun Milne, who first pointed out that "financial Culloden" story to me yesterday, praises the Scotsman's coverage of the crisis - especially the title's exploration of the political angle to Brown's bailout.]

While this morning’s Financial Times refers to Brown being hailed as a hero around the world, back home there’s a warning his rescue plan – involving part nationalisation of Scotland’s two biggest banks – cloaks a “financial Culloden” for Scotland. Bill Jamieson writes in the Scotsman:

“This is a massive humiliation for Scotland’s banks. The injection of government money through preference shares that will yield 12 per cent crushes the interests of the ordinary shareholders.

[...] I fear that, once the panic and hysteria that overwhelmed markets in the past month have subsided, this deal will create a blazing resentment among shareholders. They will see it as a Treaty of Versailles of finance, with the banks bent double by crushing reparations.

Humiliation? For the banks, yes. Resentment? I’m not so sure. It would be hard to have too much sympathy for those “ordinary shareholders”, whose holdings were, at least, rendered worth something by the rescue. They’d had warnings, as the Scotsman itself reported earlier in the year, and many would have enjoyed the ride on the way up.

No, to find the true impact you need to think a little big bigger, alas. It’s the elephant in the room spotted, elsewhere in the same paper, by Peter Jones.

“”Prudent, cautious, responsible” and “stable, reliable, solid” – the characteristics of three centuries of Scottish bankers and their banks all seemed instantly vaporised the moment it was announced yesterday that Royal Bank of Scotland and Halifax Bank of Scotland had been forced to collapse into government ownership.

The humiliation of this admission of catastrophic failure, the injury inflicted on national morale, the shame of having to go cap-in-hand to politicians, will reverberate around the nation for years, with as yet incalculable consequences for the political economy of Scotland.”

It’s Jones’ “national morale” point that interests me most.

These extraordinary events must, surely, have an impact on Scottish nationalism, which has been enjoying a resurgence in recent years.

Two questions. First, could Scotland ever, really, be independent while London owns a big chunk of the national banks? Would it want to be? Of course, you could argue that London always did own a big bit of these huge, multinational businesses, but not the government, specifically.

Second, could an independent Scotland possibly have funded the help now being given to RBS and HBOS? Even in good times cash would be a little more tight in an independent Scotland; shoving £37bn on the national balance sheet could have provided a debt for generations, even if you believe (as I do) it might turn out a decent investment in the end for the taxpayer.

Tackling the second question first, last weekend’s Scotland on Sunday could only unearth generalities on how an independent Scotland would cope. There were some suggestions a Prime Minister Salmond could follow Ireland’s lead in guaranteeing all deposits, although a Scotland in the Eurozone could do little by itself about interest rates.

There’s an interesting discussion below the piece that points out Iceland – used as a role model by Salmond in the past – was never a good example for Scotland, because it has a smaller, less diversified economy. But there is, also, the general admission this is a global problem over which a single nation – whatever its size – has limited power.

The most chilling quote on what would have happened in an independent Scotland was left to the end of the piece, and it was supplied by a senior (presumably unionist) Scottish banker.

“HBOS would have gone bust and RBS would have followed five days later. The Scottish state simply wouldn’t have enough money to rescue two banks of that size as Iceland has done. As it would have been a Scottish problem rather than a British one – they’d both have gone to the wall.”

That’s not a consensus view, either among commenters at the Scotsman or voices on other publications.

At the Spectator, Fraser Nelson argues that London (with some added Brussels for good measure) would wade in to save RBS and HBOS whether Scotland was independent or not. He thinks a combination of Brown protecting a British banking network, and the European Central Bank swooping “like a vulture trying to nationalise the banks of Scotland for the everlasting glory of Brussels” would have picked up the pieces.

That rather answers my first question; were Nelson right, we’d have ended up with today’s actual arrangement whether or not Scotland had gone it alone.

Just to cheer us up, Nelson also notes that Scotland’s last spell of independence ended with the Darien Disaster, which led to Icelandic-style bankruptcy and union with England. That latter fate, he warns, may still await Iceland (“at gunpoint”) if relations don’t improve soon.

We certainly can’t argue any more that it’s just nationalists who are miserable now.

“What if you started a television season and nobody watched? From behemoths such as Heroes to new shows such as Fringe, US television is in the middle of a ratings freefall as viewers turn away from escapist dramas and tune into politics instead.

All the superpowers in the world aren’t enough to make people stop worrying in times like these and some of America’s biggest hits have suffered – on ABC Grey’s Anatomy drew 17% fewer viewers to its season premiere this year, Ugly Betty was down 15% while NBC’s Heroes, coming off the back of a much-criticised second season, slumped 29% from 14.1 million to 10 million viewers.”

Maybe the need for escapism will come later as things really begin to bite. And it will; as Mrs Tosh points out, despite the schadenfreude of some who claim to be enjoying the fall of finance’s big beasts, this crash will be harming us all. There’s true drama being played out as we discover how financiers and politicians deal with it, because their action – or lack of it – will determine our prosperity for years to come. The ratings – including a 57.1m audience for the first Presidential debate – show just how strongly TV viewers know it.

I can’t get enough of it. The whole grand circus – the big themes and the strategies being played out by both camps – makes this the most interesting campaign I’ve ever seen, and I’m glued to it. I’ll probably stay up tonight for the debate, now we know Sen. McCain is going to turn up.

Aside from Twitter’s effort, which m’colleague Meg Pickard writes about in detail at her place, another wheeze that has caught my eye is the Economist’s Global Electoral College. It’s pretty much as it says on the tin; a worldwide electoral college where countries have their votes allocated based on their population. Like Twitter, it’s a way of reflecting the opinion of lots of people who don’t have a formal say in this hugely significant election.

“The Economist has redrawn the electoral map to give all 195 of the world’s countries (including the United States) a say in the election’s outcome,” explains the magazine, making its allocation of votes to the US sound like an act of largess, and also suggesting the poll will have an impact on the actual outcome, rather than it all being make-believe. I think most US voters would have a problem with a system that handed them only gets 432 college votes out of the total 9,875, while India gets 1,588 and China 1,900.

Globally, It’s safe to say the race is not quite as close as it is in the US; no countries are red so far – not even China – and most of the world is blue. McCain, it appears, has yet to convince the world, or at least the Economist-reading bit of it, and if Rest Of World had a vote this would be a landslide for Obama.

There are a number of countries which are still white, or haven’t passed the threshold of 10 votes. Iran, interestingly, is undeclared – we can only assume this state of affairs reflects a lack of Adam Smith-admiring Economist readers in the country, rather than genuine indecision.

Not that we know, of course, if the country’s endorsment would play well among those who actually do have a vote in 39 days…